One More Time to Live
by Jilly-chan
Summary: AU Pre-Series-ish, written for the Before the Beginning challenge. Young, impressionable but also determined, Dorothy only needed to find someone to pledge her politics and her loyalty. Then two teenaged boys came to study at her home for the summer.


One More Time to Live  
  
By Jillian  
  
(Disclaimer: I think by now that I've lived with Dorothy long enough that I should be able to claim her as a dependent on my tax return. However, I cannot claim these characters with a good conscience—just in case the IRS wants to review my paperwork.)  
  
Author's note: added to the ending  
  
~*~  
  
Bulletproof. The irony of her code name while in training made her ribs scratch against each other unnaturally as the laugh was, for once, natural. A low-throated hiss was a consistent noise in her ears. Like air leaking from a tire, her lungs began to deflate.  
  
The top of her head felt like someone had lifted it off and poked a memory: a memory of her malicious delight while she poked the air free from the older boys' bicycles. If they couldn't escape together, and they were too young to take the cars without a chauffer, Milliardo and Treize would have to stay on the property. And if they stayed, she could catch up to them on foot. Treize had his rifles and they might let her watch while they practiced shooting the clay pigeons.  
  
They had come to study governmental policies and procedures with her grandfather. Treize easily charmed the oldest Catalonia patriarch with his smooth manner of speaking. Although, when all adult ears were distant, she heard him joking with Milliardo as they put on their outdoor shoes and gathered up the equipment necessary for a boyish adventure, "Rather old fashioned this bunch, don't you think, Milliardo?"  
  
"I suppose," the taller boy acquiesced with a shrug, "I don't see how you can always pay attention to their philosophizing."  
  
"It's easiest to accomplish things from within. Knowing them inside and out makes my ideals stronger," Treize had explained with an aloof tone, and she marked his words close to her heart.  
  
Dorothy had watched them from around the side of the china cabinet as they grabbed a few biscuits from the kitchen and left through the huge glass door that led into the back yard. She waited and then quickly crossed the distance to press her face against the glass. Through the sunshine and green, she saw their silhouettes approaching the shadow of a small shed where she knew that their bicycles leaned against the wall—sabotaged.  
  
Then they appeared again, Milliardo with his almost white hair coming loose from it's tie and Treize coming out next with his hands on either hip and chin pointed forward as a breeze caught them both as it rushed toward them from around the mansion.  
  
"Unlikely friends," She'd heard her mother say as the women who came to her Thursday afternoon tea would sit in the library and take turns reading pages from some book, "I'm amazed that the Peacecrafts would let their son come here, of all places. And the Kushrenadas are so much new money, you don't know what to expect from their loyalties. At least, they are civil when they happen together like this."  
  
Unlikely friends.  
  
She watched Treize reach out and turn Milliardo with him to walk away together, and Dorothy reached up to turn the door handle and push it out best she could without letting the same strong wind tear it from her grasp. Even in the direct sunlight, the temperature was still cool, and Dorothy felt goosebumps creeping up her limbs from the wrists and ankles. The fabric of her skirt caught and tangled around her legs as she ran in the direction they had left. Toward the lake.  
  
Closer to the edge of the water, the grass thinned and left patches of mud where in her braver moments Dorothy had sometimes chased toads. A small dock had a rowboat tied to it, and the water was busy with the waves of wind blowing over. She stopped and looked around her, scanning the open shore and around to the opposite side where the forest came up to the edge of the lake.  
  
"Dorothy." She knew Treize's voice and wilted somewhat when she realized that he wasn't calling to her. Instead, he had simply named her.  
  
He and Milliardo were behind her now. Treize with his hands in his pockets, wearing khaki shorts and a white dress top that were the extent of his attempts to dress comfortably. Milliardo in contrast reduced his tabloid worthy lineage by wearing simple black and grey. The clothes they wore in those few weeks at her grandfather's home that summer did more to define her impressions of them both. Treize always displaying his elegance as naturally as a caged bird. Milliardo's dark colors letting himself sink into the shadows cast by the other boy's brilliant personality. When studying astronomy with her private tutor, she had learned about the sun and the moon and how some people were drawn to worship the celestial lights.  
  
Her fingers curled into fists while she clenched her jaw, uncertain what to do when faced with the two teenagers that she adored.  
  
Staring at her feet, she saw how the soles of her sandals pressed into the earth. If they rejected her, she wanted the ground to open and swallow her up. She peeked at them from between the tangle of her blonde hair that the wind was relentlessly rearranging around her face.  
  
"I followed to see what you were doing," she spoke at last, unable not to hear some explanation and her voice in the relative silence.  
  
"I think she wants to get dumped in the lake," Milliardo said with a pale eyebrow lifted. Dorothy had faced down bullies before, had been one herself, but she still stiffened at the thought of the two of them, those two, casting her away. She kept her arms rigid at her sides, wondering if she could fight them off if they came at her. Naturally, they would want to hurt whoever had ruined their bicycles. She had considered that possibility as a risk and determined the action was worthy of the opportunity to tag along.  
  
Dorothy watched Treize waiting for his judgment. Milliardo waited also. They both instinctively deferred to his authority.  
  
"Maybe we can make use of her," Treize folded his arms across the white shirt, making them seem even more bronze. With those few words, Dorothy knew she'd succeeded. She had been found acceptable. Treize knelt in front of her and lifted her chin with the knuckles of his late-summer tanned fingers, "If you can learn subtlety someday, Dorothy, then you will be a champion of my quest for peace."  
  
Milliardo had laughed, slowly at first and then it escalated until his shoulders quaked and his eyes couldn't stay open.  
  
After a moment of watching his tall friend with a distant, bemused twitch in his cheeks, Treize added, "Don't mind him, Dorothy. I'll have Milliardo buckled to my chariot and paving the way for you and everyone else."  
  
"What did you mean by that?" Milliardo's humor turned surly. His cheeks were immediately red, as if Treize's comment had given him sunburn.  
  
"And I promise, my Dorothy," Treize had turned back to her. His eyes were piercing like she had imagined King Arthur's must have been in the stories her mother read. People became blindly devoted to men like Treize, "I promise I will make such a great change to burn this world until it cries out for salvation."  
  
"Don't be scaring her with your political rubbish," the blonde boy sounded a little pleading, as if he wanted to coax Treize back from the edge of an unstable cliff.  
  
"Even the Peacecrafts will stumble," Treize said, and Dorothy admired how smooth his cheeks seemed and the way his hair shimmered like a new copper coin, "And the colonies will descend upon us like shooting stars. I will be the prophet to lead the elect to meet that onslaught. Many will die, but I will know and keep all of their names."  
  
"Now you're scaring me," Milliardo's frown was evident in the tone of his words. But those syllables were simply background chords to the eardrum piercing weight of Treize's thundering testimony. Dorothy would not feel frightened anymore. Even if her father was an embarrassment to the family, she would not shed tears because Treize Kushrenada had given her a new purpose.  
  
"Are you with me?" He had mesmerized her with his words, and Dorothy felt the swell of his approval as she nodded her head solemnly as suited the occasion.  
  
"Until I die."  
  
~*~  
  
"Are you with me?"  
  
She nodded her head, only the heaviness made it hard to lift her chin again and she wondered when Treize had moved his fingers and let her jaw sink so low.  
  
"Dorothy." She knew this voice. And that he wasn't calling to her, instead he simply named her.  
  
Another voice pushed the clarity of its words past the wheezing air in her ears, "What was she thinking? Without backup? I'm going to drop that girl in a lake if she doesn't start acting smarter than this."  
  
"Don't listen to him. Zechs is just worried," The first voice again, and she tried to lift her eyelashes enough that she could make out the face from under the copper colored hair, "The bullet did some damage," the voice paused, and then with concealed heaviness that she recognized as worry, continued, "The medics are on their way, and an ambulance. You're going to be alright. You're going to be alright."  
  
"T-t," Her lips were so dry and her tongue could barely lift to strike the back of her teeth in sound. The top of her head fell back into place, and the numbness of memory changed back into a sharp pain of electric awareness that her body was in cold agony, wet with what she could only imagine was her own blood.  
  
She couldn't move for a moment, and his voice spoke again as fingers traced her jaw and she felt the warmth of his affection, "Are you with me?"  
  
She had to fight to achieve her annunciation, realizing how much she had changed since she had been the little girl chasing after Treize Kushrenada and Milliardo Peacecraft. How much they all had changed, learning to mature and move on,  
  
"I haven't died yet, Trowa."  
  
The end  
  
[EDIT]  
  
Author's Notes: John Steppenwolf kindly pointed out that I had made an error in judgment regarding the plausibility of this story actually happening in Gundam Wing canon. I had to laugh because I really hadn't put some of the Peacecraft continuity together, and thinking about it now does make my head spin. Consequentially, I'm going to re-class this story as AU. I still think that a younger Dotty would ruthlessly chase toads, and that Treize ultimate goal was peace—but only a peace that was achieved by him causing a war. *wink*  
  
Thanks to everyone who gives my stories a more thoughtful reading than they deserve. :) 


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